With the SSD wave coming, why do people still need a mechanical hard drive?

Since IBM invented the Winchester hard drive in 1973, the basic principle of the core mechanical structure of the hard drive has never deviated from the "Winchester" model in the nearly 40 years since then. This is the mechanical hard drive. Nothing can last forever. The performance of CPUs, graphics cards and even memory has improved by leaps and bounds. Mechanical hard drives are constrained by the inherent deficiencies of their structure, and as time goes by, the bottleneck phenomenon becomes more and more obvious. The one who breaks down and then stands up is the solid-state drive. Those who plant trees before us will enjoy the shade.

Solid-state drives, which are standing on the shoulders of mechanical keyboards, are booming. With constantly improving transmission standards and performance, and even TB-level capacity, they are eating into the market of mechanical hard drives. Faced with the relentless pressure from solid-state drives, have mechanical hard drives really become unpopular?

Today, we only talk about HDD

When the technology industry is looking forward to the pace of 2017, the closure of Seagate's Suzhou factory has sounded the alarm for industries and technologies that are complacent. Due to my profession, many students around me have asked me how to choose a hard drive for my computer. I basically provide the following answer: SSD on the system disk, if you need storage, buy a mobile hard disk or if you are using an assembled computer, you can choose a mechanical hard disk as the storage disk. The status of mechanical hard disks in PC storage has long been marginalized.

The decline of the hard disk market is also related to the rise of online storage in recent years. Internet giants have vigorously developed cloud storage and expanded the market with the Internet "game" of first free and then paid. Nowadays, online storage has become an important tool for us to exchange data. The free capacity of more than TB level, coupled with the sharing attribute, and even more, we can register multiple accounts to "expand capacity"... As long as there is an Internet connection, the hard disk can actually not exist.

Painful transformation

As the saying goes, quantitative change leads to qualitative change. Individual choices can have a big impact on the trend of the entire industry. Data shows that from 2011 to 2015, SSD shipments increased from 14.6 million to 102 million, while mechanical hard disk shipments fell from 621.5 million to 468.9 million. The sharp contrast has led to a big difference in the current situation. Reducing production and transformation have become the way out for Seagate and Western Digital, the two giants that dominate the mechanical hard disk field.

In 2014, Seagate acquired two LSI divisions of Avago and gained the opportunity to enter the enterprise-level PCIe flash memory and SSD controller market. However, Seagate lacked a flash memory production line, so it lost strategic resources to compete with other hard disk manufacturers. Seagate also shut down its consumer-level solid-state drive production line (Seagate 600 series SSD). Currently, Seagate's market share is very low, and only professional-level enterprise-level SSDs have a certain market share.

In fact, in 2015, Seagate has a trend of transforming its business strategy and development direction in the cloud computing market, that is, focusing on high-end fields. The closure of the Suzhou factory and the large-scale layoffs this year are just part of Seagate's transformation. Is Seagate going to follow IBM's old path of selling technology, pre-sales and prestige?

As for Western Digital, it acquired Sandisk and launched SSDs, competing with many SSD manufacturers. It launched black, blue, and green SSDs full of sentimentality, but the SSD market has long been divided up by large and small manufacturers. If there is no outstanding product with good cost performance, it can only be bought for sentimentality. It depends on whether Western Digital can compete with other big manufacturers in the future!

Not the End of the Road

The two major hard disk giants, which did not do well during the transformation period, have not actually given up their old business. After all, where there is demand there is a market, and we don't need to be so pessimistic. Because in this era of big data, whether it is enterprises or individuals, the demand for data storage is definitely increasing.

Now is the era of 1080P experience, and in the future it will be 4K. At the same time, with the popularization of 100M and 1000M broadband, a 240GB SSD will definitely not be able to meet such a large throughput. Therefore, whether it is an e-commerce host or a game player installing a computer by themselves, reserving a large-capacity mechanical hard drive is a necessary process.

Since mechanical hard disks cannot be called the protagonists of the storage industry, and their inherent deficiencies make it impossible to reverse this situation, why can't they put themselves aside and focus on big data storage? "I believe that mechanical hard disks can still develop for at least 15 or 20 years." Seagate CFO David Morton once said.

In fact, Seagate has already announced in the development of mechanical hard disks in early 2017 that it will release its first 12TB mechanical hard disk product in early November 2017, and will launch a 16TB hard disk in the next 12-18 months, and a 20TB one later! Among them, the 12TB hard disk is an enterprise-level nearline storage (Nearline HDD), which is still based on PMR vertical storage technology, but will be filled with helium and stacked up to eight platters, that is, a single platter capacity of 1.5TB. As for the future 16TB, it will use the new HAMR heat-assisted magnetic recording storage technology.

As for Western Digital, we have already seen Western Digital's Ultrastar He12, a 12TB hard drive that uses helium-filled SMR shingled storage technology to achieve a balance between stability and large capacity. It can be seen that both Seagate and Western Digital are on the road of large-capacity storage, and we can foresee that in the future they will take a two-pronged approach in mechanical hard drives and mobile hard drives to meet users' needs for big data storage.

With the popularization of intelligent experience, we may see the results of Seagate's transformation towards intelligence in the future, that is, intelligent storage. Maybe in the future we can use APP to remotely manage the data of the hard disk, even if the computer is not turned on, and even use the mobile phone to open and edit the files on the hard disk? Although it is just a fantasy, what if it is realized?

In addition, the continuous closure of network disks also indirectly stopped the bleeding of physical media storage. The news of network disk closures that have been heard recently has made netizens frightened. Not only has the closure of network disk services caused our data to lose their "home" and brought troubles in file transfer; it also sends us a signal that network disks are not immortal. We cannot control our destiny 100% in our own hands, and there will always be a sense of uneasiness. Therefore, it is still practical to have a hard disk in hand.

Summary: Retreat to advance

Mechanical hard disks should no longer miss the glorious days of the past. It is the right way to give way to high-performance storage media. And we should retreat to advance, focus on large-capacity storage, play to our strengths and avoid our weaknesses, and provide convenience in data storage for the majority of computer users.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.